A Combination of Chaotic Harris Hawks Optimizer‐Stacking Model and Kernel Density Estimation Method for Pressing Force Prediction During Slab Sizing Press Process

During the slab sizing press (SP) process, the pressing force corresponds to the slab profile, which guides the production schedule design and the final profile control. To accomplish the prediction of pressing force for SP, an improved ensemble method based on chaotic Harris hawks optimizer (CHHO) and stacking is proposed. A mechanistic knowledge is introduced for feature selection that enhances the rationality of input features. Subsequently, 11 machine learning models are compared and 5 of them are selected as candidate learners for the stacking method. Based on the candidates learners, 8 stacking strategies are constructed, which the stacked model with extratree regressor, gradient boosted decision trees, and kernel ridge regression (KRR) as base‐learners and KRR as meta‐learner performs the best. The R 2 , MAE, mean square error, mean squared log error, and mean absolute percentage error for the test dataset are 0.9912, 0.0856, 0.0167, 0.0005, and 2.00%, respectively, and 95% of the prediction errors are less than 0.15 MN. Then, sensitivity analysis and predictive analysis based on Shapley Additive Explanations are performed to demonstrate the good alignment of the proposed model with physical reality. Furthermore, to cope with the complexity and uncertainty of the production process, the proposed CHHO‐stacking model and the kernel density estimation method are integrated to model the prediction interval.